


Want

by SilentAuror



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Denial, HLV, Hedonism, M/M, POV: John, POV: Mary, POV: Sherlock, POV: third person, Series 3, almost more narrative essay/extended character sketch than story, but there definitely is a plot, mini fix-it, narcissim, themes of want
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-07
Updated: 2015-06-07
Packaged: 2018-04-03 09:24:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4095607
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilentAuror/pseuds/SilentAuror
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sherlock, John, and Mary each experience a different sensation of want in their lives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Want

**Want**

 

i: Sherlock

He knows the feeling of want. He has always known the sensation of its tendrils snaking in through the pores of his skin to curl around bone, splintering it and winding tightly into the marrow, hollowing him out from within. Like a bird, only the bones of birds are filled with air. His bones are filled with a negative, with an unfilled (unfillable?) void. Sometimes, when he was younger, he would turn in on himself at night, hugging his knees to his chest in the small hours of the morning, feeling the void howl within him. But one cannot fill a container when one does not know what the container is meant to hold. 

This, _this_ was always the problem. Sherlock knew that he wanted; he simply never knew what it was that he wanted. He tried filling the void with skill and an assurance of self-sufficiency, of intolerance for the foibles of others, of arrogance. When those failed, he turned to narcotics to at least dim the bleating of the want within him. He disdained the touch of most and shrank from emotional intimacy, preferring to strip away the looks of curiosity that nearly always veiled a certain underlying contempt, preferring to take the contempt directly. He told himself that he didn’t care, and when he grew older, the statement hardened into truth around him like armour. Or else he has told himself this for so long that he believes it to be truth, at any rate. (It doesn’t matter.) He tried filling the void with knowledge, with ability, simultaneously craving the respect of his peers in lieu of admiration or anything softer, while hating that he still craved anything from anyone. 

It was therefore shocking to discover, years later, accustomed to the unanswered hunger gnawing at his bones, that a single word from John Watson could affect him like nothing else. He spoke and the word soaked into Sherlock’s skin and was absorbed there, rather than evaporating like the nothingness of everyone else’s words, or running straight through flesh and bone and leaving nothing behind but smoke like the narcotics of his youth. A single word, tracking through the channels of his skin and the open cracks of his bones, a river of warmth seeping through his hollow frame and bringing the tissue to life again. It was pathetic, he tried to tell himself in the beginning, all the while shamelessly angling to make John do it again, say something else to send a bead of warmth tingling down his veins. It shouldn’t have made such a difference, the validation of this short, somehow pleasingly proportioned, limping soldier with family dramas and psychological trauma. And yet it had, from the very first. 

He found himself shocked by its warmth, shocked to his core by how much it could mean. How it managed to both stave off the void while making trenches and inroads of even deeper need at the same time. Far worse was the first time John ever touched him. Sherlock remembers it vividly: it was on the way home to Baker Street after their first proper dinner together, when they both ate. The Chinese on the corner, the owners congenially letting them stay as long as they wanted, the only customers in the place. They were walking and laughing and then John put a hand on his back for some reason, and instead of stiffening the way he normally would have, Sherlock had felt instead the heat of that small, sturdy palm even through the thick wool of his coat, felt it radiate through the fibres and down to his spine. Instead of flinching away, he’d felt tempted to lean into it, feel it more strongly. 

He knew then that he wanted – needed – to feel it again, directly on his skin. Or – wanted to, in theory, at least He never would have asked, though. Never would have risked that much. He didn’t want anything beyond that: just a touch. Platonic, but skin cell to skin cell. And without realising what he was doing, John would give it to him. Short, fleeting touches, carefully non-erotic, almost impersonal. Sherlock would silently catalogue the duration of each one, the pressure against his skin. Note the response of his nerve endings when John would brush a bit of rubbish from his hair, the varying sensations of his hand through different types of fabric and numbers of layers. But the best was always his hands directly on Sherlock’s skin. 

For a long time he found himself at a loss when it came to John. All he knew was a vague sensation of the yammering of other voices all blurring into meaningless mush when John spoke, his light, curiously unique tenor talking about any mundane thing, or barking out a warning or rebuke, or the higher frequency of his infectious laughter cutting through the bland inconsequence of every other voice in the world as deftly as a knife edge. It was a puzzle partly because John himself is such a conundrum of contrasts. Deceptive that way: almost plain at a glance, yet the longer one looked, the more one saw. Or the more he saw, at any rate. It was always the same with John’s very name. John. So plain. Four letters, one syllable. Yet the music of it, somehow turning to magic within his mouth as his jaw closed, lips pursing to form the _J_ , the short vowel, hummed resonance of the _n_. Beautiful. Like John’s starred grey-midnight eyes – like clouds in the night sky, Sherlock has sometimes thought, the sort of cloud that looks like wet cotton over a deep, silent blue, stars glittering in the open spaces. All of the contrasts – soldier/doctor. Hard muscle beneath soft wool. Tolerance beneath sharp-edged words, a touch to his shoulder to soften a scolding. All of it. 

And then it deepened, and the day he was finally able to put a name to the lifelong void in his aching, empty bones was the day he realised that he was about to lose John to someone else forever, standing there in the mouth of the restaurant, the smugness of his deduction about the host fading, the want intensifying and expanding within him so sharply and so forcibly upon seeing John there, fidgeting with his menu, that he’d thought he couldn’t breathe, and was suddenly afraid. 

John was the answer to the lifelong enigma of the void. He’d been too stupid to see it from the start. The very obviousness of the answer made him want to scream at himself. And now, finally recognising what it was that he wanted, had always wanted, Sherlock simultaneously realised the utter futility of knowing, because John was going to marry Mary. 

 

ii: John

John has known since he was a child that there was always something missing. He could never figure out what it was, not even what category it fell into. He didn’t know whether it was an activity he was missing, a food he was craving, a certain type of person or even a specific person. A certain act, perhaps, expertly given, resulting in an orgasm so perfectly rendered as to finally tick off the box and allow him to say, _That was it, right. That’s was I was in the mood for, hungry for, searching for._ He almost doesn’t even care what it is, in the end; the restless feeling of searching without even knowing if he would know it when he finds it is enough to drive a man insane. 

So he decided to try many things. He considers himself a highly sensual person and relishes new experiences. Sushi was an adventure for his fifteen-year-old palate, purchased for himself, by himself. There was never money at home for restaurants, especially not that posh sort of thing. Pocket change and a paper route had saved him enough to sample every sort of sweet and snack on the market, but there was never a single favourite, one particular thing that he bought regularly or craved. After sushi he tried most of the menu of a tiny Vietnamese place near the council flats. Then he tried Turkish, accompanied by the girl who later gave him his first hand job, shyly reaching into his jeans with the late Saturday afternoon sun slanting in through the slats of the Venetian blinds in her bedroom, panting, wet kisses exchanged before and after. He’d touched her, too, curious, his fingers probing. At school he wasn’t considered anything special. He had friends, but no one close, and girls mostly ignored him. This girl was from another school and they’d met at someone’s birthday party and she hadn’t said no when he asked her out. He still remembers the feeling of her on his fingers, slippery-smooth and warm. She’d breathed a lot, loud in the quiet of the room, but after a bit she’d moved his hand away and kissed him some more. With the next girl, he was bolder, though always courteous. She’d let him taste as well as touch, which he’d seen in a film – though not until their third date. That was the day that he discovered that he had a talent with his tongue, and set out to practise said talent as much as possible. It wasn’t until uni that he found other talents for his tongue, namely wrapped around the cock of a footballer twice his size. He’d liked that, too, though he’d kept the fact a dead secret, including the way he’d got himself off while doing it. 

He tried parasailing, then hang-gliding, though he balked at sky-diving and bungee-jumping. He hiked and he swam and he tested the limits of his body and mind both in training for the military’s medical corps. He went to Afghanistan and ate the local foods, taught his mouth as many of the words as he could gather and learn. He participated in circle jerks and comfort blow jobs and elaborate solo fantasies of his own creation. By that point, he’d come to believe that there was no satisfying the unnameable desire in his veins. He’d chalked it up to being a horny bastard and left it at that, though it wasn’t a question of sex alone. There was some appetite, some need that had never been correctly identified, and it’s terribly frustrating to not even know what that is. He’d come to accept that it was just a part of the make-up of his character, to have this unsatisfied, unsatisfiable hunger somewhere that no amount of women or adventures or anything else consumed by the flesh could ever fit, answer, fulfill. 

And then John met Sherlock, and it was like coming to life fully for the first time. For eighteen glorious months, he ran with and after Sherlock, firing shots over his shoulders and thrusting him behind himself as he put his body between Sherlock and harm like a living, breathing shield. He saw more action than he had in the war, and his body and mind sang with the adrenaline, the very feeling of being more actively alive than ever before. He threw himself into it, into the ridiculousness of sharing a flat and a life with the oddest person he’d ever met, ate with vigour, and Sherlock’s appetite could match his both in breadth and volume when the mood took him, willing to try any cuisine, any culture’s odd-seeming delicacy (once, at least), and their post-case dinners were seldom less than feasts. The only thing missing with the other, but John found that on the side, too, pounding into girlfriends until they complained, and finding other ways to keep them – temporarily – happy. 

He’d suspected that what he really wanted was for the outlet to be one and same for all of the above, but Sherlock had made it clear from the beginning that he had no interest in that sort of thing. He’d said it as nicely as possible and John had accepted it at once and never mentioned it again. It worked well enough, and for eighteen months, the unnameable hunger was quieter, though never gone from sight, its hollowness still gnawing in the pit of John’s stomach from time to time. 

He acknowledged, close to the end, that it had finally started to take a more definite shape: Sherlock’s shape, to be precise. He’d tried talking himself out of it, telling himself that it would be very much like being in love with a robot, an inanimate thing, because he could scarcely imagine an incarnation of Sherlock who cared that way, felt things like that. Who had physical needs beyond their post-case indulgences. Who craved love and touch like any other person. Sherlock has never been that, though, so John ruled it firmly out as an option. But at the moment that he finally allowed himself to see honestly that he still wanted that, without dissembling even just to himself, he was girlfriend-less and had been for some time. He’d been forced to summon every dirty fantasy he’d ever had that night to calm the fire in his body, eventually coming so hard that he actually passed out, and it was Sherlock he was thinking of in the moment that it all coalesced at last and shot out over his fists in streams, the vibrator still humming in his arse. As he lay there in bed, panting at the ceiling afterwards, he’d known that he could never tell Sherlock, that it would not be appreciated or welcomed and that it would lose him the best thing that’s ever come into his life. And so he hadn’t. And then Sherlock died. 

That death had shattered retroactively every single moment of happiness he’d got out of the previous year and a half, the hole within him seeming to grow until every part of him was nothing but the hole, the contrast of having had _almost_ what he wanted, of having lost forever every possibility of having even a fraction of it burning in its emptiness. The void of lost possibilities, the void of Sherlock himself, was not to be borne. Sherlock had taken up so much space within him and John had welcomed it. 

For the first year, he was too sick with grief to remember things like bathing and eating. His skin felt dead to the touch, and while his stomach felt empty, eating made him feel nauseated. There were no safe foods, nothing that didn’t remind him of Sherlock. He started drinking until Harry herself intervened and made him start going to meetings. He’d cried at the first five of them, to his own embarrassment, but shame had stopped existing in many ways by then. When it was his turn to share the first time, it had taken him three or four minutes to even get the words out. Then he said, with difficulty, “My best friend is dead.” And then he’d cried, and the other alcoholics, pathetic losers who knew nothing about him, had patted him on the back and said encouraging things, and that hadn’t helped his dignity any, either. Harry had explained while John buried his face in his knees, his arms locked around them, hating the entire world in general and the people in the room with him in particular. It was the same the next four times. There wasn’t a sixth visit; by then he’d stopped the drinking on his own. They told him it wasn’t even a real addiction, but to be careful going forward. And he had. Harry suggested he start seeing a therapist again, so he went back to Ella, and somehow he got through the worst of it, sort of. 

He got a job again. And two weeks after he started, Mary was hired. She was interesting and cute and obviously liked him a lot, and he’d had mixed feelings when she asked him out, but he’d gone. He was almost surprised to find he could still get it up after all that time, that his cock hadn’t wilted and fallen off, but it hadn’t. And it was nice. Just nice. But nice. It didn’t make the hunger disappear, but it was a decent distraction. Decent enough that, in lieu of the long-dead possibilities he’d started thinking about toward the end, it wasn’t a bad second choice. Though to call it a second choice isn’t quite accurate. It was more like a twelfth choice, because the gap between the thing he’d really wanted and what he actually had was staggering in its immensity. But it was a long shot better than nothing. He could sweat some of the want bleeding out of him into Mary, channel it, even tell himself that it was Mary that he wanted until he very nearly believed it. Sometimes it takes him far too long to come, even using every fantasy he could think of, even the ones about Sherlock, though it still hurt to use those ones. It was as though he shifted back into that world of semi-twilight that he inhabited before he met Sherlock. It wasn’t bad, just not the same – and still far better than the misery he’d been living in up until that point. 

And then Sherlock came back, and John’s entire world turned on itself. 

 

iii: Mary

Mary has known all her life exactly what she wanted: power. Coming from the most ordinary of families, the middle child of three, born to dull, harmless, gentle people whose cardboard existence made her want scream, she had turned her back on them and dispossessed herself of them as early as possible. She left them at fifteen and called herself an orphan, rather. The life of a high school student in rural Indiana held no appeal whatsoever. She had skills, honed in hours of secret practise, and she intended to use them. She sought power in fields dominated by men, and after a few setbacks, turned her interests to something she could do well: she could kill. 

She’d always had good aim, and the Agency seized upon her skills and put her in their sniper training program. She made her twentieth state-sanctioned kill before the age of twenty, and then she grew bored. She experimented with other forms of power: interpersonal forms. She was cunning and secretive and a good actor. She could be sweet and worm up close to someone, making her blue eyes sympathetic and just as understanding as could be until secrets were slipping over lips that should not have confessed, should not have trusted her, but they always did. She could be seductive, and she discovered that she liked this particularly, taking a man apart with his own desires. And seduction comes in so many forms.. 

She left the CIA and went freelance. She’d always wanted to travel, and good assassins are hard to come by. She was in demand. She would travel to Moscow or Paris or Dublin and explore the city like any other keen, wet-eyed tourist, but the next day she would be on her belly somewhere, holding someone’s life in the palm of her hands. That was the addiction, right there: that moment. Knowing that only she knew that her target was a dead man and that she held every card. That was true power. It wasn’t only men. There were several women in there. A twelve-year-old boy, once. She’d wanted to ask what the boy had done, but in her field, one doesn’t ask these questions. One either accepts the job and the fee, or one turns it down – and flees. Mary killed, took the money, and kept her mouth shut. 

She killed without discrimination. Sometimes they were terrorists, criminals who deserved to die. Sometimes the terrorists were her employers. In fact, more often than not, it was this way. Once she took a job from a man whose brother she had killed only the previous week, though obviously he hadn’t known that. It was a little irony that she couldn’t share with anyone, though she’d giggled to herself over it in the privacy of her hotel room that night. She’d had to be creative with that one, just to avoid having the two kills look too similar. She’d shot the brother, but the new victim died as the poison in his coffee cut off his air supply and turned his face a rather disgusting shade of purple. She’d watched it through binoculars, pleased that the poison had acted as quickly as that. She used it again after that. She prefers the directness of killing from a distance, her trigger finger controlling exactly when her victim would die. She often felt a certain kinship with them. _You are mine,_ she would gloat to them. _Your life belongs to me now. Say your prayers._ The trigger would release, the person on the other end of her laser dot slumping to the floor. _Night-night._ She would savour the moment for just a few seconds, then pack up and get out of there before feeble local authorities triangulated her location. 

But then she began to age. Her knees would protest if forced to crouch for too long. Men began to think her too old when she would attempt to seduce them. She’d had a good run, she told herself, with a reminder that the average assassin’s career is less than five years long. She’d hung on for over eighteen. 

“You want out?” one of her employers asked one day when she told him. His lover, one of her competitors, stalked about the room like a caged tiger, throwing glares her way. “I’ve got a job for you that you might like, in that case. Consider it a long-term undercover project.” 

Her eyes had gleamed. “Tell me.”

Jim Moriarty had stopped near his lover, exchanging an unreadable look with him, a hand on the other’s hip. “You two once did a job together,” Moriarty reminds her. “At a swimming pool in London. There was a bomb. And the two of you.”

“Yes.” She remembered. “And?” 

“The short, plain one,” Moriarty said. “He’s feistier than he looks, though you may recall that for yourself.” 

She remembered the small man with the sandy brown hair. “What about him?” 

Moriarty left his lover and walked slowly across the room to her. “Get close to him,” he said. He picked up a piece of paper from a table nearby and gave it to her. “You’re a nurse now,” he said. “References are listed. They’ll vouch for you if need be. You’ll be in a clinic and you’re to get close to this one. Seduce him. Move in with him. Get him to marry you if you can.” 

She’d stared at him. “Why? What’s so special about him?” 

“I need a man he used to know,” Moriarty said. “Rumour has it that he’s dead. There’s a grave, at least, but I have a hunch that it’s empty. I could be wrong, but – if he does turn up, you’re to let me know.” 

She’d agreed. He hadn’t warned her that John Watson was still an emotional mess, but she got him to take her out for dinner two weeks after she started at the clinic. It took longer to get him into bed, but he loved that, spending himself in her, though he always wanted it quiet for some reason. It took her months to realise that he wasn’t shushing her, but preventing himself from saying the name: _Sherlock_. 

When she realised that, Mary had simultaneously realised how precarious her position would become should Sherlock Holmes not actually be dead. And after a few months of having John’s head on her shoulder, listening to him ramble on and on and on about Sherlock, she discovered that she was addicted to it. She discovered that the specific form of power she craved was to be wanted. It wasn’t so much that she wanted John, particularly, but she wanted to be wanted by him. _You’re so good to listen to me,_ John would tell her. _I miss him so much, sometimes I don’t even know what to do. I was so lost without him._ And Mary would pat his head remind him that she loved him and wasn’t going anywhere. This dependence, being needed this way, might have bothered some. For her, it came with a thrill of power, of possession. She _owns_ him, owns him body and soul. He needs her, would go to pieces without her. He’s said it enough, and she knows it to be true. She loves it. Every time he said something mopey or gruff, she carefully manoeuvres herself into a position of being not just supportive, but supportive to the extent of undermining his ability to keep himself upright. He takes it without knowing she’s doing it, and is even grateful for it. And this is all she craves now: for John to want her. And want her he does. 

Or at least he had, until she shot Sherlock. 

 

iv: Sherlock

When John married Mary, Sherlock watched it with his face composed in a deliberate mask of disinterest and lack of affectation. He did not watch the kiss nor did he listen to the vows. Later he could not remember them even when he tried. What he did remember was John’s voice saying _I do_. He’d closed his eyes then. Briefly, not long enough for anyone to notice or remark upon. In retrospect he never did understand how it took him until the moment of his champagne flute slipping from his fingers as he realised that he could not toast John’s marriage, despite what he’d said about giving him to Mary. How could it have taken so long? And yet it had. It took until that moment for some voice in his head to state, rather firmly, that he wished it had been him to whom John had given his vow, promised to love and cherish and protect and live out all the days of his life with forever and ever amen. But it wasn’t: it was Mary. 

Mary. He had made himself like her, hadn’t he. Told himself that it could have been worse. That it could have been the boring, snobbish teacher or the whiny one with the spots who complained when he interrupted her dates with John. Mary shared, at least to an extent. Mary was nice to him, at least on the surface. And with Mary, he hadn’t probed, had he? For John’s sake, he’d deliberately not deduced her. He’d seen that she was liar from the first, and he hadn’t pursued it. For John’s sake? For his own sake, rather, because after the pain of John’s rejection he would have done anything to keep from risking that extent of John’s wrath again. John was engaged: he therefore had a choice to accept Mary at face value or lose John again. So he accepted Mary. 

_I’m not involved_ , he’d insisted on the phone to Mycroft, and he’d meant it. He had the speech planned and intended to verbally, deliberately, calmly give John away. If traditions were different, he could have walked John up the aisle and put his hand in Mary’s himself if anyone had cared for an even stronger symbol. At least that way he could have held John’s hand just the once, for only a few seconds. It almost would have made it worthwhile. And yet, despite his noblest efforts to give John away and take himself out of the equation, Mary’s bullet had found his heart not one month later. 

The pain of that bullet is to this day the only thing that has ever hurt as much as the gnawing ache of the void in his bones. He remembers every pulse of it vividly, remembers the dull warmth of blood pooling within his chest cavity, the siren-sharp panic of the shock setting in as his pain receptors were overwhelmed and shut down, remembers descending within his own mind to the deepest hell of his own creation to face the devil he’d made and chained there. None of the people who appeared in his head as versions of his own knowledge or experience could help – only the thought of John had the power to raise him from that hell and back toward the light, because John could not stay married to Mary the killer, Mary the liar, Mary the not-Mary. 

He had time to think in the hospital, to decide how best to save John from Mary, all the while cursing himself for not having looked. He thought he had prevented himself from seeing it both for John’s sake and for the sake of their friendship, but his oversight nearly cost him his life, and he didn’t know what Mary had in store for John. It seemed to him in retrospect that Mary and John could not have possibly met by chance, because Mary could not possibly be a nurse. He did not know why she found John or what her intentions were, but her connection to Magnussen frightened him. The ease and obvious practise with which she held a gun frightened him. Her proximity to John frightened him. The question became whether John would be in more or less danger were either of them to send her away. Then Janine came, and he realised that he no longer knew entirely what to make of her, either. Was it paranoia from being shot that led him to wonder if her persona was not as innocent as he’d originally thought? Was there something more beneath Janine’s tone, a suggestion of threat, or was his own imagination superimposing that? Either way, he decided then that John must be told sooner rather than later, in a controlled setting, with supervision. It worked, though he’d experienced more discomfort than usual in lying to John. It was for his own good, Sherlock told himself and John both, at least later, though he still felt uneasy about it. Mary was contained through Sherlock’s lies, the threat neutralised until he was in a position to be able to help John again. He lacked information; he did not know what Magnussen knew about Mary that he did not, and with a bullet hole in his chest, he could barely shuffle from his bed to the toilet without assistance, much less protect John from an assassin in his own bedroom. 

Though there isn’t an assassin in John’s bedroom, because John came home. He said it was to look after Sherlock; he never said anything about Mary. Not at first. Instead, he has changed Sherlock’s dressings and fed him morphine and tea and put blankets around him as the autumn grew cooler. He’s lit fires and washed dishes and cooked, and settled into his chair with deep sighs of contentment that Sherlock wondered whether or not he knew was doing aloud. And he touches Sherlock more than he’s ever touched him before. Sherlock is in heaven. He does not care that John’s touch, no matter how light, makes the wound scream with pain at times, when he is removing stitches or pressing a new bandage down over it, apologising the entire while. Just having the warmth of that craved touch on his skin makes everything worthwhile – so much so that Sherlock looks forward to even the pain. John will wince and murmur something along the lines of _Sorry, this is going to hurt, but I’m going to have to press down right near the incision here_ and Sherlock will mutely shake his head and wait for the warmth of John to fill his bones again. His want for John has grown to the point of obsession, so that he spends all of his spare time thinking about when John will touch him next and if there is any way John could ever been persuaded to let him cross the line he’d come so close to on the night of his stag do. To kiss him. Sherlock closes his eyes dreaming of this multiple times per day, trying to imagine realistic scenarios wherein this could happen, but he can never quite believe them. 

They’ve had all of the discussions about Mary now, John’s eyes troubled, pained, but wanting to be told the truth. Genuinely wanting to hear it, and people so rarely do, Sherlock has found. There were two large conversations about that, both quite soon after the shot, Sherlock lucid and swimming in pain for the first one, but wearing a dressing gown and seated at the kitchen table for the second. John had asked questions and absorbed the answers, raised other points for clarification, then nodded and accepted it all, going away to integrate it into whatever mental system he uses for the storage of important information. 

It’s late October now and the winds are howling around the corners of the building, whistling past the windows and seeping in through cracks in the old mortar. Sherlock is sitting at the kitchen table perusing the newspaper, a half-finished cup of tea off to his right. 

“Are you warm enough?” John asks, turning away from the sink and drying his hands on a tea towel. 

Sherlock is wearing pyjamas, a dressing gown, and – because John insisted – slippers ( _I don’t want to risk you coming down with an infection on top of everything else_ ). “I’m very warm. Too warm.” 

John comes over and puts a hand on Sherlock’s forehead, checking his temperature. His hand lingers longer than necessary, or so Sherlock thinks, and suddenly it’s very quiet in the kitchen. “Hmm,” John says, thoughtful, breaking the silence. “You don’t feel feverish. You can take off those slippers if you want, though.” 

Sherlock toes them off under the table. “Thank you,” he says, and John’s laugh sends another wave of warmth down his spine where it pools in his lap and floods his lower body. John is standing very close to him, his physical presence like a magnet. 

“Happy to oblige,” he says. His fingers slide up to Sherlock’s hairline, his thumb stroking a little, and Sherlock’s bones seem to swell with the influx of feeling from this small, practically insignificant gesture. 

Sherlock turns his head and looks up at John, for once unable to keep his face from projecting far too much, John’s touch undoing his every defence. John’s eyes meet his for a long moment, and his hand slips down sideways until it’s resting on the side of Sherlock’s face. Sherlock reaches up and puts his hand over John’s without breaking the eye contact, the hunger of want surely plain for John to read now. He feels naked and exposed, his heart thundering in his chest, but it’s nothing to the roaring of the void in his eardrums. John’s gaze is locked to his and he must have finally seen what it is that Sherlock has been wanting for so long, because he bends down and puts his lips on Sherlock’s. It’s tentative, cautious, but even so, fire sweeps through Sherlock’s frame like a pine forest brittle with drought, heat flushing and prickling down his back and into his every nerve ending, his very skin coming alive. Some wild impulse makes him want to tear it off and bare everything that he is and has to John, _Take me, take all of it, please_ , but he can barely cope rationally with kissing as it is. Their mouths are pressed together and it stops being tentative the instant Sherlock puts his hand on the back of John’s neck and holds him there, silently asking him not to stop this, not to let go. 

John makes a small sound against his lips and then his are opening, drawing Sherlock’s apart, the heat of his breath coming into Sherlock’s mouth and mingling with his own, and when John’s tongue touches his, the emptiness in his bones seems to turn instantly to magma, searing and surging in waves within him. The feeling stretches his skin and infuses every part of his body with heat, the flesh between his legs swelling and hardening and he is dizzy, clutching the back of John’s neck and the sleeve of his dressing gown at the same time. He needs more of it, infinitely more, and yet what John is giving is completely overwhelming at the same time. He is conscious of John’s hands pulling him to his feet by the elbows, pulling him closer, his arms around Sherlock’s back, bodies pulled flush together. The kiss could be termed frantic by this point, the snarling want raging like a wild thing within Sherlock’s being. He is barely capable of breathing and kissing at the same time but it doesn’t matter, nothing bloody matters except this, that John is kissing him and must never, ever stop. 

It does stop, though, both of them flushed and breathless, hands in each other’s hair, panting against each other’s mouths, and John is looking at him as though his very existence is a miracle. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he is demanding, not releasing Sherlock in the slightest. “Why didn’t you ever say?” 

Sherlock has to blink and search for words to say. “I thought you still loved Mary,” is what occurs to him, though perhaps that’s not quite right. 

“But – before the wedding, did you – ?” When Sherlock nods, John presses him further. “And before that? Before you – went away?” 

“Always,” Sherlock says, his voice sounding strangely hollow. “Though – perhaps I didn’t entirely realise, precisely – ”

John makes a sound of desperation and kisses him again, to Sherlock’s vast relief. He pulls away again after several minutes, trying to kiss and speak at the same time, interrupting himself constantly with his mouth on Sherlock’s face and neck and throat. “Me too – I never – saw it – exactly – but I – and then you went away, and – if I’d known, I – ”

“Yes,” Sherlock says, his eyes closed, a surge of triumphant gloat bursting in his veins. “Yes!” 

“I never would have – you should have – ” John stops himself, looking up into Sherlock’s face. “And I should have told you, too. I should have taken the risk. I didn’t think you would want it. But I should have said.” 

“Yes,” Sherlock says again, John’s words causing as much of the heat within him as his touch. “But now – ”

“Now we’ll never not know,” John declares. His hands slide down Sherlock’s spine and settle on his arse. “You’re hard,” he says, as though Sherlock wasn’t aware, his eyes dark pools of desire of his own. 

Sherlock feels a bit embarrassed to have it just pointed out this way, but he can also feel John’s arousal pushing insistently into his thigh through their pyjamas. “So are you,” he says, his mouth going dry, though the molten heat within him rages on undeterred. 

John isn’t embarrassed at all. “I know,” he says, his eyebrows lifting in suggestion. “I need to touch you. Can I? Would that be – ?” 

Sherlock’s mouth floods itself with saliva. He nods quickly, afraid to trust himself to speak, lest he say far too much. 

John makes a sound of distinct satisfaction and lifts his chin to kiss Sherlock again. The kiss is hard, his lips and tongue all pulling at Sherlock’s as his hands pull him ever closer. His fingers massage the muscle of Sherlock’s arse and Sherlock can feel his penis harden even further, pushing damply against the fabric of his pants. John’s tongue strokes against his as he reaches down the front of Sherlock’s pyjamas. His hand finds Sherlock’s erection and curls around it, and Sherlock, to his lasting horror and pleasure both, feels the magma surge through his body the instant John touches him, rising and bursting out of him like a volcanic eruption, his entire body jerking and spasming as the onslaught of his orgasm wracks his frame. John’s tongue is rubbing against his as the howling want finally reaches its crescendo and Sherlock is helpless to stop it, caught in throes of pleasure so violent that he cannot breathe. 

 

v: John

John opens his eyes, startled by the suddenness of Sherlock’s climax, his hand filled with hot, sticky release, and Sherlock is panting, his eyes tightly closed, his face flushed – is he embarrassed? He doesn’t know what to say, exactly. He’s been with men before, though he generally denies it, and he’s never had to deal with someone else’s premature ejaculation. His own, yes, once or twice, but never someone else’s. He opens his mouth to say something, very much aware of his own, aching cock, but he doesn’t get past his inhalation. 

“I’m sorry,” Sherlock says, his eyes still screwed shut, the colour deepening in his face and neck. “I didn’t – I’m not – ” He stops, the agonised words cutting off in his throat. 

“It’s all right,” John says immediately, hastily, trying to reassure him. And it is. He’s wanted this for so long that it almost doesn’t matter what form it happens in. All he knows is that his hunger has a shape and that that shape is currently shuddering in his arms and looking like he wants to die and he can’t have that. He doesn’t take his hand from Sherlock’s cock, just in case he likes being held after, but pulls his face closer and presses his lips to his forehead. “I don’t care,” he murmurs, his lips still there. “I don’t care at _all_. It doesn’t matter.” 

He releases Sherlock, keeping a hand on the back of his neck and Sherlock opens his eyes, looking as though he is taking a monumental risk in doing so, his eyes searching John’s almost fearfully for signs of disappointment, of rejection. “I’m not – I don’t – ” He stutters, trying to say whatever it is that he can’t seem to articulate again. 

John waits, then says, gently, “I know. It’s fine.”

“You’re – ”

“Very sure.” John physically feels the relief sag into Sherlock’s limbs and he supports him. “Come on,” he says, aware of how powerful the after-effects of a first orgasm with another person could be for Sherlock. “Let’s get you to the sofa.” He does take his hand away now, subtly wiping it on the side of his own dressing gown, and steers Sherlock’s long legs over to the sitting room and onto the sofa. 

“But you – ” Sherlock begins, protesting as they sit down, looking down at John’s rock-hard cock still trapped untouched in his pyjama pants. “What about – ”

“I can take care of it, if you’d rather,” John says, scanning Sherlock’s eyes and trying to get a read on what he’d prefer. “Or you can… help me.”

Sherlock’s tongue comes out to touch his lower lip. “What do I do?” he asks, sounding uncertain. 

John smiles at him. “For starters, kiss me,” he says, and Sherlock acquiesces so quickly it could be deemed relief, possibly because it’s something he seems to know inherently how to do – because he _does_. John hadn’t expected that, somehow, but the instant their mouths came together it was as though it had been practised a thousand times before, and perhaps it has been, if only in their respective imaginations. He’d suspected at times, particularly since he moved back in, that Sherlock might be interested in something after all, despite what he’d originally thought about Sherlock not even having those sorts of feelings, but he hadn’t thought until the Mary talks that it might be this much, this deep. That it is as deep as that is beyond question now. Sherlock told him during those terrible conversations that he had to go along with the lie of Mary having saved him, for his own protection and for that of his unborn child. _So you didn’t mean it, when you said she saved your life,_ John had said, watching Sherlock intently, and when Sherlock had shaken his head, not meeting his eye, John had known. Sherlock has literally taken a bullet to the heart and refuses to have his would-be killer punished for her crime all in the guise of keeping him safe. That’s love. He doesn’t know what Mary thinks love is, but it isn’t whatever she thinks it is. Sherlock, of all people, knows precisely what it is – and he loves John. Only John hadn’t thought to ever see it move beyond a strictly theoretical level. 

But it has. Sherlock is kissing him as though his very life is hanging on the quality of his kiss. It’s deep and thorough and completely arousing, John thinks weakly as Sherlock’s tongue strokes his, the sensation going directly to his cock. John has his right leg partly folded under himself, the left dangling over the edge of the sofa, his right arm hooked around Sherlock’s neck. With his left, he pushes his pyjama pants down and takes himself in hand, and it feels better than it ever has when it’s just him on his own. After a minute, Sherlock’s hand drifts downward, settling over John’s and he breaks off the kiss, looking down at his larger hand curled around John’s pumping fist. “Can I – is this – ”

“Yeah,” John groans, his chin jerking in a nod. “That’s it – just like that – ” He moans as Sherlock’s fingers tighten around his. It’s not going to take him long at this rate, either, and actually, maybe that would be better, make Sherlock feel better about having come rather instantly there. He speeds up his movements, leaning his forehead against Sherlock’s, and he can sense rather than see Sherlock glancing up at his face once before dropping his eyes back to where the action is. When he comes, Sherlock makes a sound deep in his throat that sounds like satisfaction. He lifts John’s hand to his mouth and studies it for a long moment, then licks it. John is panting, and this takes him by surprise. “What are you – ” 

Sherlock ignores him, licking his palm clean, and John’s balls send an ache of want that have nothing to do with having just come through his body and into his bones. “Salty,” Sherlock says, when John’s hand is clean, then bends forward to kiss John again, not caring that it’s still a bit breathless on John’s part. 

John just about climbs into his lap in his haste to get closer, wrapping his legs around Sherlock’s back. It feels like coming home for the first time in his life, in a way that he has never felt before. Baker Street is the only home that has ever felt like home to him, and he knows now in this instant that he will never leave it or Sherlock again. The feeling of having arrived somewhere and knowing down to his bones that it is his place, the place where he inherently belongs, has never happened to him in all his life. And it is _this_ that finally satisfies his lifelong hunger: having Sherlock Holmes in his arms. He cannot let himself cry, so he settles for kissing Sherlock as hard as he can, feeling as though his entire heart could come bleating out of his mouth if he lets himself speak. 

If Sherlock is surprised by the strength and urgency of the embrace, he doesn’t let on, giving it back just as strongly as John is giving it. Many, many minutes later, they finally break apart and sit there in each other arms and their pyjamas, panting, looking into each other’s eyes, and it is Sherlock who speaks first this time. “The world could have ended just now,” he says hoarsely, “and I wouldn’t care.”

John’s heart swells enormously in his chest. “I know,” he says. “Me too.” 

“John – ” Sherlock stops, then starts again. “I don’t know how to tell you how much I’ve wanted this. How long I’ve wanted it. I need to know – are you certain that you – want this? It’s just – it was so sudden…” He trails off, his eyes searching John’s intently. 

John nods, his eyes not leaving Sherlock’s. “I’m very certain,” he says steadily, his voice low, trying to keep his emotions in check. “I’ve known that I could feel this way about you if I let myself for a long time now. Since before you jumped. And then I thought I could never have it because I thought I’d lost you forever. But I’d met Mary and was… making do. That’s all it was, you know. It was you I wanted, but I couldn’t leave Mary just because you had come back. Though in retrospect, I should have. I don’t know what’s going to happen there, with Magnussen and the baby and everything. But I’m not giving this up. I don’t care what I have to do or say to keep it, but I’ll do it. I’ll pretend anything you want me to pretend to Mary to make everything work – but I am _not_ giving you up.” 

Sherlock doesn’t answer right away, his eyes still probing John’s as though hunting for any sign of doubt or weakness. Then, suddenly, the intensity fades and he bites his lip. “Even though I…” He clears his throat, his face flushing again. “I – that was profoundly embarrassing.” He looks away. 

“Sherlock. Please.” John knows he sounds pained. “I told you, I couldn’t possibly give a toss about that. You’re new at this. We’ll… explore, assuming you’re up for that.” 

“I am!” Sherlock looks back at him now, his tone insistent. “I – I’ve wanted this for so long that – I supposed I was a bit overwhelmed. If you’ll be patient with me, I’m certain I could – do better next time. I just – ”

John leans forward and silences Sherlock’s wince-worthy stream of cringing apologies with his mouth, and Sherlock permits it, throwing himself into the kiss instead. After several long moments of his, John releases him, turning his mouth to Sherlock’s throat instead. “Had anyone ever touched your cock before?” he asks, careful to keep it gentle, following his words with a stroke of his tongue at Sherlock’s pulse point. 

He feels the word on his tongue. “No.” 

“Have you ever touched someone else’s?” 

Another hum of vibration, and a shake of his curls. “No.” 

“That’s what I thought.” John lifts his face to smile into Sherlock’s, his eyes gleaming with dark promise. “Then it’s hardly surprising. Especially if you’ve wanted it for awhile. So we’ll experiment.” 

Sherlock hesitates. “Have you?” he asks. “Touched – other men?” 

John feels his lips purse, then says, reluctantly, “I usually deny it. But – I don’t want to keep anything from you. Yes. I have. A few times. With my hands and mouth both.” 

To his surprise, Sherlock says, firmly, “Good. Will you teach me? How to touch you?” 

John looks at him in wonder for a moment. Most other men would be jealous. But then, Sherlock has never been noticeably like anyone else he’s ever known, and that’s at least half of what makes him so special. “Yeah,” he says, his voice going soft. “I will. I absolutely will.” 

Sherlock smiles for the first time since John touched his forehead, and nods down at John’s lap. “You’re aroused,” he observes, echoing John’s earlier statement and putting a hand high up on John’s thigh. “Let’s start now.” 

*** 

The next few weeks are incredible. John, who has always considered himself more or less insatiable, hasn’t met his limit yet, but it’s got close a few times. For both of them it seems that this was the answer to some lifelong question, an answer that satisfies just as much as it re-poses the same question, the same hunger. For John, being with Sherlock is like finding water in a desert, quenching some bone-dry thirst, that hunger he could never satisfy no matter how many people he fucked, how much adventure he fed himself with, how much delicious food he ate or adrenaline-fuelled experiences he tried to sate himself on. Sherlock is the only thing that can satisfy him. And Sherlock, in turn, has talked vaguely about ‘the void’, which he’s never quite explained, but John thinks he has a glimmer of understanding. He thinks it sounds very much like his own hunger, only they’ve gone about trying to solve their problem the opposite ways: Sherlock through denying himself anything physical, while overcompensating with his own abilities, his intelligence, his independence, and John by gorging himself on any and every hedonist, sensual experience he could get his hands on. But the answer was always there right in front of them both. 

They spend days at a time in bed during the first week. And as John handled Sherlock’s instantaneous orgasm kindly that first time in the kitchen, Sherlock has gained confidence and if he still comes a little too soon the second and third times, he does last longer and lets himself go more fully, gasping out apologies with his cock fully down John’s throat that last time. The fourth time was better; John distracted him by talking about a case that he’d never fully understood from years ago, teasing Sherlock as he began to stutter and stumble over his words, John’s fingers twisting and crooking within him, his other hand squeezing around the base of Sherlock’s cock. That time, when Sherlock groaned, a long, white forearm thrown across his forehead, John eased off his grip and sucked Sherlock down his throat, letting him pump up off the bed four or five times before coming hard, so loudly that Mrs Hudson probably heard it from downstairs. He’d flipped John over a moment later, not even giving himself a second to recover, his mouth working hungrily over John’s flesh and John had come almost as quickly and every bit as loudly, completely turned on by the spectacle of Sherlock slowly unravelling and losing the ability to form complete sentences. 

They waited only until the third day before trying anal sex, and from that point forward they haven’t stopped. They both like it both ways, though it’s safe to say that there isn’t anything that either of them haven’t liked so far. John tops approximately sixty-three percent of the time (or so Sherlock has informed him) and sometimes when he bottoms, he does that from the top, too. Sherlock gains confidence daily, and when they’re not actively making love, they’re trying to make up for lost time in fumblingly telling each other all of the things they never managed to say in the past four years. By the end of November, John thinks that Sherlock has kissed him more than all of the other people he’s ever been with put together, and he still isn’t over it or tired of it in any way. They can be doing anything, though they’re never far apart these days, and it takes almost nothing for one of them to just look at the other and then they’re kissing again. Sherlock hadn’t even stopped when Mrs Hudson came upstairs one day, exclaiming from the doorway, or trying to. Sherlock had merely said, his mouth still on John’s, “Not now, Mrs Hudson,” and gone on kissing him, his arms swept around John’s back as they stood there in the kitchen, utterly lost in each other, the dishes or cooking or whatever it was completely forgotten. 

It’s a veritable feast. John feels as though he’s at a banquet that he never gets full at, one where he can just go on gorging himself indefinitely. He knows that they have to figure out what to do about Mary, but that doesn’t even seem important at the moment. All that matters is Sherlock. Being Sherlock as much as humanly possible, sating themselves on each other over and over and over again. He has never been as happy in his life, and the very width of Sherlock’s heartbreaking smiles make him feel like a god on earth – to know that he was somehow capable of putting _that_ amount of radiant, earth-shattering joy on another person’s face, particularly Sherlock’s, means more to him than anything else in the world ever could. 

He says this to Sherlock one day, lying back in his arms in Sherlock’s bed. Sherlock strokes a large hand over his forehead, his thighs cradling John’s legs, his other arm draped loosely over John’s chest, “What about becoming a father?” 

“What?” For a moment John is actually confused. “What about it?” 

“You said that making me happy makes you feel more important than anything else you’ve ever done,” Sherlock reminds him. “How does that compare with the fact that you’re going to become a father?”

John tilts his head back onto Sherlock’s shoulder so that he can look into his face, and Sherlock cranes his face around so that John can see him better. “I honestly haven’t even thought about that in ages,” he says frankly. “It was always… more theoretical to me than anything else. I mean, I get that Mary’s pregnant, but I’ve never even _thought_ about being a father. To be completely honest, I don’t particularly want to be one,” he says, admitting it aloud for the first time. “When you told me, at the wedding, I just felt – blank. I still do. I don’t know what we should do about the baby. I mean, do you want a baby here at Baker Street with us?”

“No,” Sherlock says at once. “But if you wanted your child to be here – ”

“I don’t,” John interrupts him. “I don’t want anything but you.” 

Sherlock begins to smile. “I was so jealous of that child,” he murmurs, his nose nuzzling into John’s cheek. “I thought you wouldn’t even have what little time Mary was letting you have with me once your child was born. I never wanted you to have children.” His arms tighten around John. “But the fact is that you’re going to have one, and you need to decide what you’re going to do.” 

“Doesn’t it all rather depend on what we do with Mary?” John asks, looking back and up at him again. “I mean, if she takes it really badly, she could run away and keep the child from ever knowing me.”

“And how would you feel about that?” Sherlock asks, his mouth nipping at John’s ear. 

“Relieved,” John says bluntly. “I don’t want to raise any children with a killer. I don’t want anything to do with anything that has Mary’s DNA.” 

“Fair,” Sherlock concedes, reaching down to start lazily stroking John’s cock again. “I don’t particularly want anything with Mary’s DNA anywhere near me, either. But the child will also have your DNA. That’s another case. Assuming it is your child.” 

John’s eyebrows lift. “Do we have any grounds to believe it couldn’t be? That would be the best solution.”

“What about David?” Sherlock asks, and from his tone John realises that he has been sitting on this thought for a long time. 

“Do you think – ?”

“His presence in Mary’s life is highly suspicious,” Sherlock says. 

John’s cock is firming up swiftly despite having come with Sherlock’s cock inside him not thirty minutes earlier. It’s becoming difficult to concentrate with both of Sherlock’s hands working over his body this way. “I suppose we’ll – have to – wait and see,” he gets out with difficulty, and Sherlock laughs at him. 

His laugh turns into a sound of pleased surprise when John turns around in his arms a moment later, straddling his hips and rubbing their cocks together. “This, or do you want me to fuck you?” he asks, his eyes half-lidded. 

Sherlock makes a sound of satisfaction deep in his throat. “This,” he says, his hands on John’s arse. “Only because I’m a little sore from this morning and I want you to fuck me after dinner.”

“Done.” John puts their mouths together and the kiss is wet and violent and wholly satisfying. 

Life has never been better, Mary notwithstanding. 

 

vi: Mary

Mary sits on the sofa in the empty flat and strokes her growing belly. John does not want her any more. John does not want her any more. John does not want her any more. This is the thought that keeps cycling through her head and she doesn’t know what to do with it. Normally she’s so sharp, so quick to come up with a solution to an obstacle, but this one just leaves her feeling blank. Perhaps it’s the pregnancy hormones blocking her ability to think clearly. The thought follows her around like a ghost, nagging at her, reminding her constantly. Pour a cup of (decaffeinated, ugh) coffee, and John does not want her any more. Pee for the third time that hour, and the thought is there with her in the loo: John does not want her any more. Clean and re-clean her gun, just for want of something to do, bored with everything on TV, and John does not want her any more. 

He didn’t leave her. That much is still true. He could still come home. And maybe he does want her, sometimes. Maybe he misses her. John is an extremely sensual person, almost to the point of nymphomania, or so she’s occasionally thought in the past. How long can he actually go without sex? Surely he must want her sometimes, lying awake in his old bed at Baker Street and jerking off. Surely he thinks about her when he does that. He’d better be thinking of her. 

Mary is driven to distraction by the lack of communication. She’s given in and texted him, and he does text back most of the time, but it’s always short. There is nothing to indicate that he misses her or wants to come home, or even to see her. She tells him about the doctor’s appointments and he usually responds. She does not tell him about David. She doesn’t particularly care about David, to be frank. He comes and goes, though she makes him call first, just in case John is going to come home. He’s begged her for a paternity test, so sure is he that the baby is his. Mary is less certain, and doesn’t particularly care to know the truth. The baby may be all she has to draw John back again. But she does not want him unless he wants her. 

Curiously, she does not particularly miss _him_ ; she merely misses being wanted so badly by him. Being needed. After Sherlock came back, it was never the same, but he still leaned on her, if never as much. He used to complain about Sherlock’s antics, though sometimes he would smile at the same time, which bothered her. She would instantly take his side and be sympathetic, and he would revel in it, in the sense of knowing that justice and reason were on his side once and for all. And then he would usually pay attention to her again, make love to her. Sometimes he still seemed far away even while doing that, even while inside her, and she hated that. Sometimes he kept his eyes closed the entire time, and twice he’d started it again, accidentally let his mouth form a _Sh_ – before cutting himself off. It was always right at the moment of his climax when he was the least in control of himself, and Mary hated that, too. 

One thing has emerged clearly since everything fell apart: she should have killed Sherlock properly. Made sure that he was dead. Only, she hadn’t wanted him to die there in the office; she’d needed time to get away. It had definitely been a mistake to let Sherlock live, though. 

She pushes herself to her feet and spontaneously decides to phone John, ask to see him. There is no answer, though. It rings five times and then goes to his voice mail. It’s only just after nine in the evening; he can’t be sleeping yet. Mary paces, angry and beyond frustrated. To be reduced to this, when normally she is the one to hold the power in any situation! Feeling nasty, she calls David instead and puts on her most feminine, lonely voice – seduction of another sort. He comes instantly, like a good dog, though he’s always nervous about Sherlock for some reason – not John, but Sherlock, of all people. That, she’s never understood. She makes him strip and then lie down on the sitting room carpet, watching her with hungry eyes as she peels layers of clothes from her swelling body. His want isn’t as good as John’s, but it’s better than nothing. She straddles his face and laughs as he half-suffocates, pleasuring her, and she closes her eyes and imagines that it’s John. She makes him say her name as she shifts back, makes him beg her before lowering herself onto his cock. His voice is similar in pitch to John’s, and his face is close enough that if she squints he could almost be John. He lacks both John’s pathos as well as his edge, though. He’ll never be the same. He will never have that same ocean of unsatisfied want burning holes through him, body and soul, driving him through life, his voracious appetite for all things emotional and physical devouring anything he can lay his hands on, swallowing whatever Mary has to offer whole. David will never be that hungry, possibly because for him, there was never a Sherlock, a something that he wanted and could never have. 

Even knowing that – she hadn’t minded being second to Sherlock, because Sherlock – childish, immature, asexual, autistic, clueless Sherlock – would never give John what he wanted, and John would therefore always have his hunger, always be grateful to her for letting him fuck her as often as the mood took him, mumbling apologies when he came before she could, which nearly always happened after he’d been on a case with Sherlock. She gets it – Sherlock is attractive in his own, bizarre way, but it’s never going to happen and John knows it, which is why he married her. She misses the drive of his hunger, the restless lack of satisfaction in his eyes. She’d thought it meant he would never leave her. 

David finally gets her off and she moves off him, not caring that he hasn’t come yet, leaning back on her elbows on the carpet as he jerks himself frantically off. 

“What’s the date today?” she asks, her voice lazy and slow. 

“Wh-what?” David gasps, his fist tugging rapidly at himself. It’s a bit pathetic, honestly, Mary tells herself. Once she never would have had sex with the likes of him unless it had been for a job, but desperate times call for desperate measures. 

“The date, idiot,” she says, her eyes sparking with impatience. 

David moans and comes over his fist, squirming up off the carpet and getting it all over himself, and she decides that he is completely useless. With difficulty she gets to her feet and goes naked over to the wall calendar, trying not to let her belly make her waddle. “It’s the – sixth of November,” David pants, just as her eyes are finding it. He wipes his fingers on the carpet. “I wish you’d let me finish inside you,” he complains. 

“Go home,” she says, not looking at him. 

“Mary – ”

“Go home,” she repeats. “I’m bored. You’re boring me.” 

He gets up then and comes over to stand behind her, putting his hands on her breasts, the nipples swollen and sensitive, his mouth near her ear. He kisses her and she permits it, drinking in his desire for her. His desire for himself, for his own cock, doesn’t interest her in the slightest, but this… still. “Kiss me,” he says, and she closes her eyes and feeds off his want. 

“Beg me,” she says. 

“Please, Mary, I need your mouth – and you’re so gorgeous like this, I love a pregnant woman – let me have your mouth, love, please!” 

Mary smiles. “More,” she requests, and David babbles another round of nonsense. She lets him stay long enough to pleasure her with his mouth again, kneeling on the carpet in front of her, then lets him have her from behind, his hands cupping her breasts, talking all the while about how much he wants her. It almost meets her need, but not enough. Because no one ever needed as much as John did. 

John does not want her any more. But he _must_ , because it’s the very nature of John to want. Thanks to Sherlock, John will always be hungry, and someday he will have to come back to her, if only to feed himself from her endless supply again. They are perfect together: John wants, and Mary wants to be wanted. 

 

vii: Sherlock

Sherlock is lying on his back, breathing hard, and John’s arm is draped heavily over his chest and shoulder, his mouth pressing fervent, hot-breathed kisses into Sherlock’s chest, and it is incredible. 

“You’re amazing, you’re extraordinary, you’re brilliant,” John is murmuring, a cadence of steady praise flowing so easily from his lips. “I’ve never felt so good in all my life. _How_ are you so good with your tongue?” 

“I don’t know,” Sherlock says honestly, and John laughs, and the laughter makes his skin prickle with heat in the very best of ways. He thinks he could live on the music of John’s laughter alone, its warmth filling him and more, ebbing up through the pores of his skin and surrounding him in its embrace. He feels so full these days. Every single day is wonderful, practically magical in ways he genuinely had not considered could exist. He has never known happiness like this; he feels drunk with it, drunk on John – John, who has taught him so much, his hands as skilled in teaching as his words. There is practically nothing they have not tried, and where John’s considerable experience has faltered, they’ve researched together, looking up diagrams and watching (unrealistic, Sherlock has scoffed) pornography videos until they felt sufficiently educated to try for themselves. Which is a delicate way of phrasing all the times a laptop has been hurriedly slammed shut or accidentally kicked off a bed or sofa as they’ve struggled to get undressed or, if already nude, back inside one another’s bodies. They never argue over who will do what. Perhaps that will come down the road. They’re both extremely willing to accommodate, John as much as he is, because it doesn’t _matter_. All that matters is that they fill one another again, fill each other’s voids until this magical, unnameable thing overflows between them, bathing them in it. 

John lifts his head and looks at him, his starry blue-grey eyes full of warmth and merriment and liquid gold affection. “I’m not hungry any more, you know,” he says, his voice both rough and soft, and Sherlock understands that he isn’t talking about food – though he could be; they’ve eaten and drunk more in the past two months than Sherlock has in all his life. John seems to have woken his every dormant appetite, not that he lacked an appreciation for good food before now. But now everything tastes better, his taste buds singing with flavours and textures, just as every other part of his body seems to be fully activated and alive for the first time in his life. He has tasted every part of John many, many times now, slid his tongue into every crevice and opening without reservation, only desire. Just now, he licked and probed into John’s anus, working his tongue inside that dark, earthy heat until John’s eyes had watered and he begged for Sherlock to fuck him, and so he had, pushing himself into the now-familiar entrance to John’s body and rutting there until John’s body tightened around him and spasmed, John’s orgasm so strong that he had literally screamed, muffled by the pillow he’d bit down on. He has taught Sherlock stamina, taught his body how to pace itself, and Sherlock counts it a triumph every time John comes before he does. He’d let himself go then, egged on by John’s breathless encouragement, slamming into him until the entire world around him was the red magma tide roaring through his veins and spilling in heat into John’s body. 

He turns his head to the side to find John’s eyes. They’re closed, but open, sensing Sherlock’s gaze. “I’m not hungry any more, either,” Sherlock tells him quietly. “Or, at least, I don’t feel empty any more. I just want you. More and more of you. I’ll always want you.” 

John smiles, and Sherlock feels it in every pore of himself, feels the glow of it deep in his belly. “I love you,” he says. “I’ve said it before but I’ll never stop. I love you, and I always will, and I agree: I’ll never stop wanting you. This is all I want, for the rest of our lives.” 

Sherlock’s heart throbs and stretches itself painfully, as though trying to explode out of his chest, as it does every time John says these magical, unbelievable words. (He does believe them, though.) “I love _you_ ,” he counters, and John’s smile deepens still further. Sherlock turns on his side and John closes the remaining distance and kisses him for a long, long time. “I don’t care about the work any more,” Sherlock says after, as John’s fingers tug through his sweaty curls. “I don’t care about anything but this. Being with you. That’s all that matters.” 

John laughs at him. “Don’t be silly,” he says. “Of course you care about the work. It doesn’t take anything away from this, though. We’re just – this is the honeymoon phase. We’ll figure out how to do all of our usual things without needing to be touching at all times. You’ll see.”

Sherlock frowns. “Why would I want that?” he asks, and John laughs and kisses him again, not bothering to try to argue. “What if you do change your mind?” he asks suddenly, breaking off the kiss. “I know you’ve said you won’t, but you can’t know. What if the baby is yours?” 

John could get exasperated with him, but doesn’t. “I won’t,” he says patiently. “I told you, it doesn’t matter. I’ll do whatever I need to do, but it’s not going to make me want to leave you. I’m never going back to Mary. You know that.”

Sherlock considers for a moment. Then asks, “Do you think we’ve had sex more than you and Mary did yet?” 

“Oh, yes,” John assures him dryly. “I’ve had more sex with you in the past two months than I’ve ever had with anyone, full stop. And I plan on having a whole lot more, so stop worrying, would you? Though if you want to finally get Mycroft over here and hear his plan, I’m all for it. Just tell me what I need to say and when, and we’ll get out of this mess I’ve created.” 

Sherlock studies him. “You’ll say anything,” he says, gauging John. 

“Anything,” John vows. “I’ll say what you tell me to say.” 

Sherlock nods. “Okay. Good. So: first things first: we need to neutralise Magnussen. Get whatever information he’s got on Mary. And you’ll need to go back to her first, to neutralise her. We settle Magnussen. Then you’ll start an argument and get a paternity test. If it’s not yours, you’re home free. If it is yours, then you have to tell her that you don’t want her any more, and see if she still wants you to stay.”

John looks very dubious. “But how long will I be away from you?” he asks, his brow furrowing. “I know I said I’d do anything, but…”

Sherlock bites his lip. “Let’s make it as short as possible,” he says. “Maybe a week?” 

“A week?” John repeats, looking unhappy. 

“A typical paternity test takes about forty-eight hours,” Sherlock reminds him. “But perhaps we can see each other during that time. If it’s at all possible, I’ll make sure we do.” 

“But – what if she wants me to – you know?” John asks. “I couldn’t, and she would suspect, because – well, I always wanted to, before. Usually because it was really you that I was wanting, and I was willing to take any substitute. But now that I have the real thing – ” He stops, his eyes searching Sherlock’s. “I’ll figure it out, find some way around it,” he says instead. “I’ll do my bit and make it work. I promise.” 

Sherlock smiles at him. “I know you will,” he says. “Let’s keep it as short as possible. We’ll plan the Magnussen sting for Christmas Day. You can invite Mary to my parents’ and forgive her then. Hopefully you’ll be back home by New Year’s Day.” By _home_ , he means Baker Street, obviously, but John understands. 

“I could almost live with that,” he says, his eyes on Sherlock’s. “I just hope that nothing goes wrong at Appledore.” 

Sherlock shakes his head. “It won’t,” he promises, aware that it isn’t a promise that he should be making, but it’s too tempting to want to promise John the world and everything in it. 

 

viii: John

Sherlock looks back at him before disappearing into Mycroft’s car, his look unreadable, but John knows that everything is going to be all right. The plane’s engine shuts off as Mycroft crosses the tarmac toward him. He is holding a large manila envelope out and John reaches for it without thinking, looking his questions at Mycroft. 

Mycroft’s cool grey eyes cut to Mary, standing just behind John’s shoulder, and says, “I imagine you’ll want to read that quite soon. It contains the information you’ve been looking for. We’ll be in touch. Good day.” 

The _we_ is extremely vague, but John assumes that he means him and Sherlock. He looks at the car and Sherlock is looking at him as the car pulls away. Despite their plans to keep their time apart as short as possible, it’s currently the first of January and he and Sherlock haven’t seen each other since everything went south at Appledore. All he knows is that Sherlock has somehow been recalled from his death mission to Serbia, thank God, but he has no idea where Mycroft’s car is taking him or when they’ll see each other again. John rips open the envelope and takes out a small sheaf of paper. The top page reads, in Mycroft’s hand: _**Instructions:** 1\. Do not read this here on the tarmac. Go back to Mary’s flat._ John sighs and puts the papers back in their envelope. 

Mary is looking at him, wary, her eyes lined and puffy. He knows that she is filled with apprehension. Sherlock explained the calling card of a typical narcissist, and while people John can think of (namely Donovan) might have scoffed at the notion of Sherlock labelling someone else a narcissist, it isn’t really funny because he isn’t one. Mary, on the other hand, is. And right now she is very much lacking the thing she craves, which is for John to crave her, and he doesn’t and hasn’t been great about disguising the fact. “What is that?” she asks now, looking at the envelope as though it contains a bomb. 

“I don’t know yet,” John says tightly. “Could be something about Moriarty. Come on. Let’s go home.” Home. Home is Baker Street, not the flat he has lived in with Mary for less than a year. It doesn’t matter. He’ll be leaving soon enough. They drive in silence. Mary reaches over and puts her hand on his knee at one point, almost tentative, but he knows her too well to believe that. It’s an attempt at seduction, playing the shy, are-you-mad-at-me card, and he isn’t having it. He ignores her. 

After awhile, Mary takes her hand back and puts both in her lap and turns her head to face the window. He can feel the offended waves radiating from her. She holds out her hand to him as though she needs help going up the front steps, so he lets her have it. She _is_ eight months pregnant, after all. 

Once inside, John wastes no time in taking out the papers again. He turns to the second page as Mary places herself heavily on a kitchen chair that she’s brought into the sitting room. Page two reads _For your eyes only._ John is standing across the room from Mary; no danger there. He turns to page three. _Moriarty’s return was a ruse to free Sherlock._ Page four is longer: _Paternity test conducted by David Fenderby, using a blood samples from himself and MM, provided by Fenderby. He is in protective custody. Results on following page._ John turns another page, glancing at Mary. She is watching him like a hawk. Like a snake, rather; there is something reptilian playing about her eyes. Page five is a scan of the test results, and John’s heart sags with relief: he is not the father of Mary’s child. Page six is written in a different hand: Sherlock’s. It says simply, _Come home, John._ John looks at it for a long moment, his head reeling. This is his ticket out. He looks up at Mary, who is waiting impatiently. 

“Well?” she demands. “What is it, then?” 

She’s nervous, he can tell. He does feel sorry for her, to an extent. Especially if her precious David is in custody. “It’s not about Moriarty after all,” he tells her. “It’s about the baby.” He nods at her belly. “I’m not the father,” he says bluntly. “David is.” 

At least six or seven emotions play over Mary’s face in rapid succession before finally settling on something like fear. “You – knew?” she asks jerkily. “You don’t… you’re not surprised.”

John shakes his head. “I suspected. We suspected, rather,” he corrects himself. “Sherlock and I. It was David who carried out the test.” 

Annoyance washes over Mary’s features. “Fucking David,” she spits. “Has Mycroft got him, then? How did he do it? Wouldn’t he have needed my blood for a prenatal paternity test?” 

“Mycroft has him, yes, and I’d assume he drugged you,” John says dryly. “Had he been asking for a test?” 

Mary’s glare is answer enough. She crosses her arms over her belly. “So – what, then? Are you leaving me?” 

She issues this like a challenge, as though it will make him wince and cringe and tell her no, that he could never and would never leave her, especially not now, that he’ll be a father to her child and always love and take care of her. That he owes her for seeing him through his grief as she had. He did feel that once, that he owed her for that. But her lies cancelled that out. Her lies, and her attempt to kill Sherlock. He doesn’t owe her a thing. “Yes,” John says clearly, without hesitation. “I am. Listen – you don’t want me any more, anyway. You need someone who needs you, and I don’t need you. Not any more. I’ve found what I’ve been looking for my whole life, and he’s found me. It’s better this way.” 

Mary’s jaw clamps tightly shut, as though his saying this has merely confirmed something she suspected but never wanted to hear. “Sherlock,” she says sourly. John nods. “Well, good riddance, then,” she snarls. “Go on, then. Go to him. I don’t need you. I don’t need either of you, and I should have killed him when I had the chance.” 

“That wouldn’t have saved us, you know,” John tells her. “Even if I hadn’t known it was you who had killed him. I couldn’t have survived losing him a second time.” He pauses, surveying her. “Mycroft Holmes is prepared to help you, in exchange for information,” he says. “He’s willing to have a look at your record if you’ll give him some names, along with some other information. He’ll see that you’re taken care of.”

“Get out of my flat,” Mary says, her nostrils white. 

John nods. “Right,” he says coolly. He takes Mycroft’s card out of his wallet and puts it on a side table. “That’s his card if you decide to take him up on it.” He pauses. “Good luck,” he says, and she doesn’t respond. John turns and walks away. Mycroft said that he would have the rest of John’s meagre possessions collected; most of his clothes are at Baker Street, anyway. The rest of it can be replaced if need be. 

He walks to the high street and hails a taxi. The ride to Baker Street seems both longer and shorter than it should. He tips the driver well and lets himself in. Sherlock is waiting at the top of the stairs, having either been watching out the window or heard the taxi. It doesn’t matter, John tells himself, getting up the seventeen stairs as quickly as possible, his face breaking into a smile. Sherlock is smiling, too, though he looks as though he’s been feeling nervous until now. He holds out his arms and John launches himself into them, the sheer relief of having got out of the entire week with both of them alive, unhurt, still here in London, and out of any and all disastrous marriages intact washing over him in waves. He is laughing with it and Sherlock pulls his chin up and kisses him thoroughly. 

After ten minutes or possibly an hour, they break apart and Sherlock says, “Come inside. I have big plans for a feast to celebrate the New Year with you.” He takes John by the hand and leads him into the flat, and John sees that the table has been cleaned and set with white linen and silverware and candles in crystal holders, a bottle of wine standing ready to be uncorked.

John looks at it all, his hand still in Sherlock’s and thinks that this moment, right now, may be the most important of his life. He turns to look at Sherlock, to open his mouth to find the right thing to say, but Sherlock beats him to it, smiling nicely at his lostness. 

“Welcome home,” he says, and it’s all he needs to say, because John is home for good now. And neither of them will ever go hungry again. 

*


End file.
